I wrote about an upcoming Pinterest IPO on January 12, 2015. I said it was probably to early for them to go public at that time, but now four years later Pinterest has confidentially filed paperwork with the SEC for an IPO.

The photo-posting app firm Pinterest has chosen Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to lead its IPO, and shares will be available later on this summer. They have begun interviewing bankers and could raise $1,5B.

(Picture: Chinese Wall)

The company was launched in March 2010, so this is a young start-up that will follow many other start ups to go public this year. They have 250 million MAUs as of October 2018, and they have 800+ employees that is working with «catalogue of ideas.»

In 2012, Pinterest was valued at $1,5 billion. Two years later the company was valued at $3,8 billion. A few year later (June 2015) Pinterest was valued at $11 billion. The same year, Fortune Magazine listed Pinterest in the 8th position on its Unicorn list.

Since its inception, it has developed into a well-funded site financially supported by a group of successful entrepreneurs, and in 2011, the company secured a US$10 million Series A financing led by Jeremy Levine and Sarah Tavel of Bessemer Venture Partners.

Later on the same year, Pinterest secured US$27 million in funding from Anderssen Horowitz, which valued the company at US$200 million. Now, a few years later, the value of the company is 60 times higher.

Internet service provider in populist India had blocked Pinterest following a Madreas High Court order in July 2016 but the block was temporary. It`s even worse in Communist China. In 2017, Chinese authorities blocks Pinterest and the website is still blocked after Two Sessions in 2017.

No response has given, but some media guess that the blocks was related to the Two sessions. Huaban, Duitang and 30 more websites has many similaarities to Pinterest, so they are not alone on the market. However, they are not blocked in Hong Kong.

The same happened to Google in China. Once a popular search engine in China with a market share of 36,2 percent in 2009, but they blocked the web site and Google`s search market share dropped to only 1,7 percent.

Communist China is authoritarian and authorities was scared and stopped Google and this is what protectionism and Nationalism works. Most services offered by Google China were blocked by the Great Firewall in the People`s Republic of China.

In 2010, searching via all Google search sites, including Google Mobile, were moved from mainland China to Hong Kong. The same year, Google announced that, in response to a Chinese-originated hacking attack on them and other US tech companies, they were no longer willing to censor searches in China and would pull out of the country completely if necessary. Is this really fair trade?

Four year earlier, co-founder Sergey Brin said that virtually all of Googles customers were using the non-censored version of their website. Google critics in the United States claimed that Google China is a flagrant violation of the Google motto: «Dont be evil.»

On 13 January 2010, the news agency AHN reported that the U.S Congress planned to investigate Googles allegations that the Chinese government used the companys service to spy on human rights activists.

The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at that time that analogies were drawn between the Berlin Wall and the free and unfree internet. Chinese articles came back saying that the United States uses the internet as a means to create worldwide hegemony based on Western values.

The issue of Google`s policy toward China was cited as a potentially major development in world affairs, marking a split between authoritarian socialism and the Western model of free capitalism and internet access.

China and America are two of the biggest economies in the world, so it is important for companies to have access to the market in both countries. A year ago, president Trump announced trade war with China, but now seems like a seven-month trade war is coming to an end.

The U.S has accused Beijing of forcing U.S companies doing business in China to share their technology with local partners and hand over intellectual property secrets, but China denies it engages in such practices.

Trump administration is looking at non-tariff barriers in China, including industrial subsidies, regulations, business licensing procedures, product standards reviews and other practices that keep U.S goods out of China or give an unfair advantage to domestic firms.

Visa and MasterCard have waited years to have access in China and Steve Mnuchin has pushed for China to open its market for them. But the clock is ticking and time is running short of the March 1 deadline to resolve the dispute or see U.S tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods rise from 10 percent to 25 percent.

Access to the Chinese market will help companies like Pinterest and other companies a lot. 50 percent of the world’s population live in Asia but it wont help if they spend most of their time on protectionism, nationalism, authoritarian behaviour, censorship, socialism and communism.

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